Highway Tunnel Monitoring Control System Helps Ease Traffic Chaos

3/22/2017

Introduction

China has many populous cities with busy highways and often congested traffic. Traffic flows are often jammed at certain road bends or sections due to things like bad weather and congestion which can cause accidents. Accordingly, a highway traffic monitoring system was needed to help reduce traffic jams resulting from incidents or vehicle breakdowns.

System Requirements

This application is a highway tunnel monitoring control system for a Chinese southwestern province, which incorporates a number of subsystems including lighting, ventilation, traffic guidance, CCTV, fire alarm, fire suppression, and emergency telephone system and broadcasting system.

System Description

For this project, an Advantech fanless embedded controller ITA-1611 was used for front-end processing for the fire alarm and fire suppression system. Running on a low power Atom processor with onboard memory, wide-temperature and wide-voltage support, Advantech ITA-1611 can operate stably and reliably 24/7 in machine rooms inside of highway tunnels. Supporting up to 6 x RS-232/422/485 serial ports, ITA-1611 can connect with various sensors or transducers in the disaster prevention system.

Furthermore, Advantech’s ITA-3630 traffic management controller was deployed for the CCTV system. Running on an Intel® Mobile Core i5 processor, ITA-3630 is able to deal with four full HD video feeds simultaneously. The hot-swappable Hard Disc Drive (HDD) bay design allows maintenance engineers to duplicate video footage or replace HDDs with ease and significantly reduce maintenance times. The ITA-3630 is also designed with wide temperature and wide voltage support, delivering ruggedness that can fulfill the monitoring control system’s requirement for 24/7 operations.

Conclusion

Advantech provided a comprehensive tunnel monitoring and control system for the entire highway network in Yunnan Province. Now, it is possible to adjust traffic flows, control ventilation, and pre-emptively avert traffic incidents from the central control station, providing safer, more comfortable, and faster journeys to all road users.